Acroyoga Longe (Lunge) Regulations (What's Your Take?)

During the preparations of our festival we were seeing if it would be possible to set up longes a.k.a lunge lines...

This ignited an interesting conversation of which the main question was:

"How can we manage or regulate the usage of the longes in a way that is easy to implement and execute, user friendly and focused on our main goal: improving safety?"

I’ll share what came up for us when brainstorming about it and we’re curious to hear your thoughts on this topic too.

Because I’ll share a few questions we have that we don’t fully know the answer to.

So maybe with more input, ideas or knowledge how other events do this we can figure out what would feel best for our events in future. 

The reason behind our brainstorm were concerns about unsafe use of the longe and whose responsibility that is.

As festival organisers we’re taking as much precautions as we can to provide a space and event in a way that facilitates, improves and promotes safety.

Obviously we care a lot about the health and wellbeing of everyone joining.

Certain things at the festival are obviously our responsibility, such as the space, the teachers we choose, organising safety workshops at the start of the festival, enforcing checking of pre-reqs for classes.

From this point, potentially implementing some kind of regulations about the usage of the longe seems like a good idea.

But realistically everyone is responsible for their own safety. With this understanding people sign up to the event and we think it is because of this element that we’ve seen ‘free’ use of the longe at other events that work purely on trusting that people only use it when they know how to. 

Of course it’s still possible to address people when you see inappropriate or unsafe use of the longe when it happens, but this is less preemptive.

So, is it the responsibility of organisers to upfront regulate who can use the longe to ensure safe use by people with experience?

Or should people be able to take responsibility themselves and be let more free in their choices to use the longe or not?

So bottom line is; what is who’s responsibility?

The concern about the unsafe use of the longe comes partly from seeing and experiencing this ourselves at events and partly from questioning how well people can self assess when deciding to use the longe.

The more we know and have practiced with the longe the more we realise how much this is also a skill to have practiced and the more we see it done poorly by people.

In our experience, too many people think about it too lightly and don’t know enough about the possible risks and downsides.

People don’t fully understand the technique and the timing of using the longe and as such can have a false sense of security.

Some communities are more experienced in this than others and roughly, compared to some other communities and festivals, we gauge that our audience is on the less experienced side when it comes to the use of longes.

Other course there are some very skilled people, but that is the minority of the 200 people attending the festival. 

The longe system itself is only half of the reason what can make a beneficial tool in acro; the other half is the person pulling the lines who is just as important.

They can do their job in a way that is super helpful and safe or they can harm the trick and create more risks.

We’ve seen dangerous situations and many examples of dangerous longing, in some examples way too much slack and incorrect timing that there is added risk when the flyer is falling, either by hitting the floor or hitting/landing on the base heavily.

Additionally, we've seen many examples of unhelpful longing where the rotation is actually impacted or restricted mid-skill due to the timing of the pull on the lines, which can also be quite impactful to the flyers body, and dangerous if it disrupts the catch for the base.

It's these examples that we want to avoid, and especially at a festival event there is such a wide range of skill levels and people often see what some people do and then try it themselves without the appropriate knowledge or understanding.

So our question or concern is: Should we as festival organisers, give everyone the possibility to take this responsibility themselves?

One way of regulating the longe use at an event we thought of is giving people clearance to use the longe after they’ve shown or proved that they are well experienced and equipped to use the longe.

It sounds so lame on one hand, but on the other hand we’re just thinking of possibilities on how to avoid dangerous situations from happening in the future.

Something we think would be nice is offering longe workshops, so we provide an opportunity for people to learn and experience under the guidance of experienced teachers.

This is a skill that is not often taught in itself at acro events and we’re wondering if that would be of interest.

We ourselves are really interested in levelling up our longe skills which is why we think this could be a good idea, but we’re wondering if more people share this opinion (or if we are just safety nerds) :)

This year we unfortunately won’t have longes set up because the space didn’t give us permission, so we could postpone decisions around the usage for another year.

That gives us time to think more about it and see how other festivals go about this topic.

In the end, longes and great people allow us to practice awesome skills and this is definitely something we want to include in the festival to offer to people.

So we just need to figure out a way that feels most aligned, and is also manageable and reasonable throughout a big event like a festival.

Because we of course can't always be checking who is using the longes, so we are looking for an elegant and safe solution to this tricky topic.

If you have any good insights, we would be very happy to hear your thoughts so we can deepen our understanding even more.

Ciao!

Laura